I think my blogging success ratio is somewhere around 10%, but the 10% hits pretty hard. And great convos can always develop in the other 90%; the worst post can spark the best conversation. This is an aspect of blogging I’m sad to see really dwindling, especially in the blogs I read regularly. I would love to see more comment threads the size of, say, the lefty blogosphere’s average thread, but for some reason a kind of individualist mindset has really taken hold in music blogs, like we’re just here to watch the madmen and women raving from a polite distance.

Tumblr is complicated — I still don’t get the back and forth on this platform that I’m describing above. (Just perusing old links of stuff I said about Paris Hilton.) But then the back and forth is tougher too now that Haloscan, the hands-down easiest commenting system of the early-to-mid-00s, is kaput. (The Echo comments that replaced it are terrible.)

Tumblr makes it somewhat easy to reblog content, but I rarely feel the sense of lively conversation — with its accompanying tendency toward taking in and responding to new information in ways that could potentially change your mind about something. I rarely find myself reblogging something here, commenting, and then being surprised that my original opinion has been upended and I have to rethink my position. I wonder if it’s a format thing, a community thing (is it easier to find and follow people you agree with, or easily disagree with, and ignore the rest?), or what. Maybe it’s a me thing. Can’t rule out the possibility.

But yeah, sometimes I miss the old Bedbugs plus Haloscan. Which may just mean I miss the last time I remember feeling more comfortable and productive as a writer.